11 will try the courts' intellectual resources perhaps as never before," the judge explained, "challenging us to parse the real from the bogus or merely perceived, and in so doing to summon powers of discernment and calibrated judgments as delicate as any we have had to elicit at any time in our history".
And she had no trouble summoning power when she needed it, particularly in Mimi's extended duet with Rodolfo in the third act.
Somehow the stentorian bass Eric Owens got through it, summoning power when called for and inhabiting the part with abandon, even while wearing a body-encasing monster outfit, the work of the costume designer Constance Hoffman.
But when he tried to sing Grimes's lyrical utterances, his voice turned thin; and when he summoned power for the heroic outbursts, his voice nearly gave out on the top notes.
According to John Makinson, the chairman of the National, the search for Hytner's successor focused on finding "a creative director of unimpeachable quality" who also had "the summoning power to attract to this building the greatest talents in British and international theatre".
Summoning power she hasn't shown in almost two years, since she announced she was dealing with an immune system condition, the 33-year-old two-time U.S. Open winner upset 12th-seeded Belgian Kirsten Flipkens, 6-1, 6-2, in a first-round match Monday.
So, too, in "Pang," Ms. Kalloo, Ms. Tooman, Paul Hamilton and Richard Rivera might have been summoning powers to guide them in a struggle to survive.
Reynolds is in fact invoking the history of the healing shaman ritual in which the tribal shaman, usually a man, dons the traditional clothing of the tribe's women to summon a power ascribed in the society to women alone, yet which becomes more concentrated when the conduit of the power passed to him is male.
The great deeds of the past may become no more than words, and no more than words are necessary to summon a power as grand and enduring even as Quixote or Achilles.
Yet his voice was so robust that he could easily summon the power for Verdi's King Philip II in "Don Carlo," Wagner's Gurnemanz in "Parsifal" and the title role in Mussorgsky's "Boris Godunov".
